Some people are addicted to crack.
Others can't get over their addiction to alcohol, or sex, or shopping.
For me, it's adrenaline.
I'm a junkie.
I like mountain biking, and motorcycles, I like speeding, and bungee jumping, and roller coasters, and rock climbing, and that feeling you get in your chest when you're not sure if you are gonna be okay. I like playing intense games of airsoft, or paintball, or even something as small as capture the flag or night tag hide and seek through the neighborhood or cops and robbers.
I also think that my addiction to adrenaline is why I like to do pranks so much. It's as much about the risk of getting caught as it is the childish laugh I get from decorating someone's lawn with toiletries.
Ever since I was a kid I wanted to go skydiving.
I was supposed to go with my brother on my 18th birthday, but my mom found out about it and cried until we promised we wouldn't.
We went bungee jumping 2 days later, and told her afterwards.
But Skydiving remained on my bucket list.
I really wanted to go skydiving before I kick the bucket.
So, this Christmas I bought myself and my brother tickets to go skydiving, and like our bungee jumping adventure, we decided to keep it on the down low. (I know, ironic, right.)
This morning we departed for Hillsburo, Texas somewhere off of interstate 35 where we found a little tiny airport laying near the service road.
It's encouraged that your first skydive be Tandem, meaning you're connected to someone who does all the actual work for you. I like doing things that are encouraged. Tandem skydiving it was.
This means that the training session we had was approximately a minute and a half long.
He said "We'll rock back and fourth three times, and then we'll fall out of the plane, and then you act like a banana, and put your legs back and your arms up. Any questions?"
Nope.
I'm good at acting like a Banana, thanks to the Fruit of the Spirit song I sang at Impact Camp.
No questions here.
Before I knew it I was strapped up, and looking like a banana. Actually, I really liked that jumpsuit, I thought I looked pretty awesome, and it was warm, and it was vintage.
I was getting so excited. It was all I could do to not jump up and down and look like a complete moron in front of my skydiving partner, Isaiah.
Isaiah was kind of an all-business guy.
I made him laugh once throughout our time together, more on that later.
The way things turned out, Micah and I went up separately, and they just so happened to call me up to the plate first. So, me and my new counterpart were on a john deere tractor putting across the field from the drop zone to the airplane hanger.
Smallest. Plane. Ever.
The pilot, Isaiah and I barely fit inside it. I sat with my back to the dashboard, next to the pilot (who just so happened to look exactly like Keith Baldridge) with my feet extended alongside the door, and my feet almost touching Isaiah's feet because he was crunched into the back, facing me.
The door opened from the top like the Back To The Future time machine car, but was rusted, and old, and used like the DART train. The propeller of the airplane was loud, so I could barely hear anything once I climbed in next to pilot-Keith.
They told me it would take 10-15 minutes for us to climb to the altitude they wanted, and so for that 10-15 minutes my heart slowly climbed up my throat and settled uncomfortably in my mouth.
From where I was sitting I could barely peer out the thick plastic window, but I slowly watched the familiar sizes of buildings shrink to insect sized dots. All the grass and trees turned into checkers of green, and yellow and brown, and the highway turned into a hairline fracture cutting through the horizon as far as I could see in any direction.
Though I loved looking out the window of the plane, it wasn't long before I realized that the way I would be returning to the patchy earth I now soared above would be to dive towards it. I came up here in this plane, but I'd be returning without it.
About that time Isaiah had me maneuver to my knees and about-face so he could strap himself to my back.
I could taste my heart beating.
He pulled on the straps, and I could feel the metal clicking us together. He told me in my right ear that he was about to open the door of the plane, and I needed to lean in left, towards the pilot.
My breathing quickened as he grabbed the handle, and I watched the door jerk upward. Immediately I felt the atmosphere sucking me out. I couldn't help but look down, out the door as the sky pulled me to the right....
"SHIT!"
Yeah.
I said it.
I said it loud.
And I felt Isaiah chuckle behind me.
I remembered my job was to lean to the left, and so I did so until instructed otherwise, all the while trying to apologize for my foul language.
"Swing your feet around and put them there," Isaiah said in my ear as he pointed out the door on a small platform over the plane's wheel, "Cross your arms, we're going to rock three times..."
I steadied myself using the door frame and stuck my feet out of the door and rested them upon the platform. My moccasins balanced on a tiny metal plate, the tassels whipping in the wind. I felt Isaiah moving into position, but all I could hear was the sound of wind rushing past my face....
The earth was squared off, semi tucks were smaller than pin dots, and I couldn't make out a single building, and there was a creamy haze that settled over the vista... I felt him start to rock behind me and then out of nowhere I wasn't scared anymore...
He rocked forward once and I catapulted us off of the tiny platform and dove into the atmosphere from 13,000 feet. I started to laugh as my body automatically flopped into a banana formation. Air was coming in easily enough, it wasn't hard to breathe, but my laughter was sucked past my face and left somewhere above me and I couldn't hear any of it.
I didn't get that sinking feeling you do when you jump from a diving board, or when you look off of the side of the canyon, it just felt like I was flying.
The wind was rushing along my jumpsuit, up my neck, across my face and into my nostrils.
The chill is almost indescribable.
If I flexed my left arm we would slide to the right.
If I tilted my body weight to the left we would barrel roll.
The patches of land were getting bigger.
I kept trying to look at them, but Isaiah would grab my forehead and force it back onto its resting place on his right shoulder.
The wind still felt cold.
I was still laughing.
I still couldn't hear my laughing and then all of a sudden my body stopped falling as quickly as it began.
It was like someone put the brakes on in midair.
And it hurt.
He'd pulled the parachute, and it jerked our bodies from free fall to slow fall.
All of a sudden sound was with me again and I could hear my laughter floating with us.
Downtown Dallas was in clear sight at the end of the yarn-sized highway, and her buildings stood like legos overlooking the blotchy clusters of colors that expanded in every direction.
It was during this calm after the storm that Isaiah told me I didn't actually have to dive head first out of the plane.
I said that his sport was probably misnamed.
He told me I was supposed to wait until the 3rd rock, and then he'd have taken care of it.
I apologized and explained that I was too excited. I could almost feel him appreciating my enthusiasm, because then he asked if I would be okay if we did some spirals in the air on our way down. Of course my response was "Spin my head right round, Isaiah, right round!"
He didn't laugh.
But he did spin us right round, right round.
The harness proved to be kinda painful, and my heart was still beating in my throat, but the way the wind ran through my hair and rustled the parachute suit I was wearing and was awesome. I could feel the G-forces across my chest and shoulders as we spun, and the realities of the vastness of the view was unbelievable.
We had a smooth landing and I was greeted by my older brother jumping up and down, right where I left him in the drop zone.
Seriously.
That is probably the most fun I've ever had.
In my life.
I think, also, it was the perfect way for me to end 2009. It's been a year of a lot of change for me. There were many mini events, and quite frankly, I'm just ready for a new decade and new chapter in my life.
I could probably easily turn this into a "Leap of Faith" bit about giving up control, or a Tandem metaphor about how God does the work in our lives and we get to simply enjoy the ride, but it just seems too obvious. I think instead I might just say:
Go Skydiving.
Jesus Ascended into heaven
We should fall from it.
